Yet another charming characteristic of America’s 40th president was his attitude towards so-called elites. “Reagan, to his credit, was never much impressed with Establishment credentials,” Steven F. Hayward writes in The Age of Reagan: The Conservative Counterrevolution 1980-1989. “When told that his prospective secretary of transportation, Drew Lewis, was a Harvard Business School graduate, Reagan quipped, ‘So much for his liabilities.’”

Hayward, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, will be the featured speaker at Accuracy in Academia’s next author’s night on November 5, 2009 @ Armand’s on Capitol Hill from 6-8 PM.